Bono, it's time to stop using 'girly' as a negative term

If you thought that U2 dropping their unsolicited album onto every single iPhone was the most unwanted noise Bono could gift you with, think again. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the 57 year-old thought it appropriate to provide comments, fitting to the year that was.

The frontman, whose weepy ballad All I Want is You reached number one in Australia, lamented that male musicians no longer have an outlet for their rage because the industry has become too feminised. Although that's not the word he used.

"I think music has gotten very girly. And there are some good things about that, but hip-hop is the only place for young male anger at the moment???and that's not good. When I was 16, I had a lot of anger in me." he told the magazine's co-founder Jann Wenner.

"You need to find a place for it and for guitars, whether it is with a drum machine???I don't care. The moment something becomes preserved, it is f------ over. You might as well put it in formaldehyde.

"In the end, what is rock and roll? Rage is at the heart of it."

Bono, whose real name is Paul Hewson, didn't denounce female artists but it does seem like his lamentations on the lack of white male rage in such a fluid music genre is code for "too many women are dominating charts".

Just like the comments made recently by Matt Damon over Harvey Weintsein, and the #MeToo Movement, Bono appears able to only view progress made by women as it affects - and in his eyes - detracts - from men.

But as gender and education professor Pam Gilbert has said, labels like "girly" and "girlie-man" are detrimental to both sexes; and they're nominally employed toward males as a form of bullying.

"Boys learn that masculinity is a performance reliant on physical control, autonomy and independence." she wrote in her research. "Being labelled a "girlie-man" is life's greatest fear. Therein lies mockery, derision and rejection."

Such rejection was evident just last week when Formula One world champion, Lewis Hamilton jokingly berated his nephew for wearing the princess dress he received as a Christmas gift. "I'm so sad right now. Look at my nephew," Hamilton said in a video that has since been deleted. After a backlash on social media, Hamilton was quick to apologise. Bono has offered no such apology, despite the outcry on Twitter.

Bono thinks music is too girly and there's not enough anger? I'm a girl and I was really angry when he put a U2 album on my phone without asking me??? Jessie Thompson (@jessiecath)
December 28, 2017

Bono's narrow definition of a genre of music, not only conflates girliness with passivity and inferiority, it fails to acknowledge that women too should have outlets to express "rage" in appropriate forms without criticism.

It also provides a reductive and racist idea that hip-hop is synonymous with angry black men, thereby erasing the works of Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z, who have moved beyond the angry stereotype to express their ideas on sexuality, politics and male vulnerability.

Bono, whose great social conscience has led to forgiveness of third world debt, helping combat the refugee crisis and AIDS awareness, would be better off leading initiatives that aim to understand factors contributing to rage in young men, including mental health, as opposed to perpetuating the mythology that men need to be angry in order to be legitimsed by society.

But poor old Bono didn't stop there. In his discussion of streaming services, such as Spotify, he managed to insult teenagers, (read: young girls), dismissing their taste as fickle.

Streaming, according to Bono, "is not actually a measure of the weight of an artist??? If you are a teenager and you're listening to whatever the pop act is, you're probably listening to them 100 times a day. It's a teenage crush, but in a year's time you won't care about that."